Ana Ng

I was in a dream where I was speaking to a girl behind the counter at a coffee shop. I was trying to order a large mocha, and she was saying something about my order...but I couldn't understand what she was saying. She was pretty.

me: "Sorry, I can't understand you! Why not just pick anything that cost less than $4. I'll drink it."

Somehow I ended up outside, but decided I needed to go back in and talk to her. There was someone else behind the counter.

me: "Is the girl who was here before still around?"

They got excited and went in the back to fetch her, and she came out and jumped into my arms. I think I already knew I was dreaming, but the abnormality of this brought that issue to the forefront of my mind.

me: "Do you remember waking up this morning?"

her: "No."

me: "Well, I'm asleep right now. So from my perspective, this is a dream."

her: "I know that about this."

me: "Are you dreaming as well? I mean, can I contact you in the real world?"

her: "Yes. I have email."

me: "Can you tell me the address?"

her: "longbeach2000 [mutter mutter]"

me: "Can you repeat that?"

her: "longbeach2000 [mutter mutter]"

Note

Very few hits on the internet for longbeach2000, most relating to some car race. Some guy named Darin has the Yahoo! email, which makes me wonder how long before every email address you could possibly randomly think of is taken. Reminds me of this saturday night live sketch.

This Japanese blog with a single entry certainly fits the pattern of "longbeach2000 mumble mumble" because the only words I can read on it are longbeach2000, and it's a user account name.

If dreams are a communication channel, it's certainly noisy and polluted by one's internal vocabulary of senses. It's bad enough trying to translate between common human languages where you'd think we knew enough about them to do better than this Altavista-translated garble:

Romantic love it does not should talk. If you discuss, it is understood, you will graduate such romantic love. If the ear it can tilt in voice of heart, perhaps many things know. The beginning first step of today and desire it did. It is contribution to new. Just a little it becomes tense.

The comment is equally confusing:

It increases from in this pleasure of comment to this article. After the meeting it leaves.

As an exercise in translation, I left a comment pointing back here. I tried writing short, simple sentences...having them translated into Japanese, and then translating the Japanese back and seeing how close I got to what I'd originally typed. What I ended up with was:

I do not speak Japanese. I used the computer in order to translate this. I would like to share this dream. Regrettable that is written on English. You can read that?

Currently I am experimenting with using Disqus for comments, however it is configured that you don't have to log in or tie it to an account. Simply check the "I'd rather post as a guest" button after clicking in the spot to type in a name.

The accounts written here are as true as I can manage. While the
words are my own, they are not independent creative works of fiction
—in any intentional way. Thus I do not consider the material to
be protected by anything, other than that you'd have to be
crazy to want to try and use it for genuine purposes (much less
disingenuous ones!) But who's to say?